FIG. 3 shows a typical computer system having at least one host processor 1301 and host memory 1302. The system core logic chip 1300, also known as a memory controller or a north bridge, facilitates data transfer between the host memory 1302 through a memory interface 1304, the host processor 1301 through a host interface 1303, graphics controller 1308 through a PCI-0/AGP interface 1306 and other peripherals such as input/output (I/O) controller 1309 through PCI-1 interface 1307. An IEEE-1394 bus 1310, also known as a FireWire bus, may be coupled to the I/O controller 1309. The FireWire bus 1310, in some applications, may be directly coupled to the system core logic chip 1300 through the PCI-1 interface 1307. The FireWire bus 1310 provides interfaces to other FireWire devices, such as FireWire storage devices (e.g., FireWire hard disks). Other components such as universal serial bus (USB), Ethernet device, etc., may be coupled to the system core logic 1300. Due to these interfaces, the system core logic 1300 requires a large number of pins. On the other hand, the logic required for the system core logic functions is relatively small. The large number of interface pins causes the area of the system core logic 1300 to become quite large. The small amount of logic combined with continuing advancement in silicon technology, results in the significant portion of that area being unused.
The concept of a media processor has been around for a while. A media processor typically refers to an engine designed for the processing of a combination of audio, video and graphics data. A media processor can also be used for other tasks that require similar processing features. The media processors have so far been designed as stand-alone processors and have enjoyed moderate success in processing video data. The media processors can be used in add-in boards to perform various tasks. FIG. 4A shows an example of a conventional media processor in a computer system. The system 1400 of FIG. 4A includes a host processor or processors 1401, host memory 1402, a graphics controller 1404, and a media processor 1405. The bus 1403 interconnects these various components together. Other peripherals may be connected to the bus 1403.
FIG. 5A shows an example of a conventional media processor. The media processor 1500 includes an input/output (I/O) interface, which receives and transmits data between the media processor and other components of the system, such as host processor and host memory 1506. The media processor 1500 may also include a cache memory 1504 for temporarily storing data before the instruction decoder 1502 decodes the instructions and transmits them to different functional units, such as vector processors 1503. The media processor 1500 may include one or more register files for storing input or output data of the functional execution units 1503.
A media processor may employ multiple functional units (e.g., adder, multiplier, shift, load/store units), and use very long instruction word (VLIW) programming. Depending on the target application, the media processor may have a combination of functional units of different kind and there may be more or fewer of these units. Some media processors only integrate vector-processing units (e.g., vector processors). Vector processors allow execution of a single instruction on multiple data elements. There are several vector processors available on the market (e.g., Motorola's AltiVec, SSE-2, etc.). The conventional media processors use the scalar processing unit available through the host processors. Thus, the vector data are processed by the vector processing units and the scalar data are processed by the scalar processing units through the host system. This arrangement may require the data to be transferred between the host system and the media processor, thus it may impact performance.
The conventional media processor may use very long instruction word (VLIW) programming. Depending on the target application, the media processor may have a combination of functional units of different kind and there may be more or few of the functional units. The VLIW contains one instruction slot for each of these units. The VLIW programming is based on issuing instructions to all of these functional units in the same clock cycle of the host processor. Not all instructions may need to be issued on each clock cycle. If an instruction slot in the VLIW instruction is not used in a particular cycle, it is assigned a code of no-operation (NOOP), but it still occupies bits in the VLIW instruction. This results in code expansion and therefore in memory, bandwidth, and instruction cache related inefficiencies.
Typically, a graphics controller may be coupled to the PCI bus. PCI bus supports multiple peripheral components and add-in cards at a peak bandwidth of 132 megabytes per second. Thus, PCI is capable of supporting full motion video playback at 30 frames per second, true color high-resolution graphics and 100 megabytes per second Ethernet local area networks. However, the emergence of high-bandwidth applications, such as three-dimensional (3-D) graphics applications, threatens to overload the PCI bus. As a result, a dedicated graphics bus slot, known as an accelerated graphics port (AGP), has been designed and integrated into the computer system, such as AGP interface 1306 of FIG. 3. AGP operates at higher frequency and transfers data at a rate up to 1 GB/sec. AGP's greater bandwidth will allow game and 3D application developers to store and retrieve larger, more realistic textures in system memory rather than video memory, without incurring a dramatic performance hit to the rest of the system.
Many computer systems, such as system 1300 of FIG. 3, use virtual memory systems to permit the host processor 1301 to address more memory than is physically present in the main memory 1302. A virtual memory system allows addressing of very large amounts of memory as though all of that memory were a part of the main memory of the computer system. A virtual memory system allows this even though actual main memory may consist of some substantially lesser amount of storage space than is addressable.
As a result, a system with a graphics accelerator connected to the AGP port of the system core logic normally requires graphics address re-mapping table (GART) to translate a virtual address space to the physical address. However, since the AGP address ranges are designed dedicated to the AGP accelerator, it is a fixed memory range that may not be shared with other components in the system.
In addition, the media processor in an AGP system normally uses mapped non-coherent memory access. Non-coherent memory operations are those operations where data goes directly to and from memory and is returned directly back to the media processor and never goes through the processor cache. On the other hand, a coherent memory system always goes through the host processor. The data of a coherent memory system may exist in the host processor's cache or in the host memory. Referring to FIG. 3, when a coherent memory access request is issued, the host processor 1301 checks whether the host processor's cache (not shown) contains newer data than the host memory 1302. If the host processor cache contains newer data, the host processor 1301 flushes its caches into the host memory 1302 before the data is read from the host memory. Lack of coherent access of the conventional approaches posts an inconvenience to the applications.
As graphics data processing is getting more complex, improvements in media data processing systems increase the ability to handle more complex processing.
Many applications, such as motion estimation for video images compressed in Motion Picture Expert Group (MPEG) standard, curve fitting, and others, require the computation of the sum of absolute difference of two vectors of numbers in order to determine a measurement of the distance (or difference) between the two vectors. If vector vA contains elements    {VA0, vA1, . . . , vAn},and vector vB contains elements    {vB0, vB1, . . . , vBn},the absolute difference |vA−vB| contains elements    {|vA0−vB0|, |vA1−vB1|, . . . , |vAn−vBn|}.The sum of absolute difference of vA and vB is    |vA0−vB0|+|vA1−vB1|+ . . . +|vAn−vBn|.
In one method according to the prior art, an instruction for vector maximum (Vec_max), an instruction for vector minimum (Vec_min), and an instruction for vector subtract (Vec_sub) are required to compute the absolute difference of two vectors using a vector processor. For example, the following sequence of instructions may be used to compute the absolute difference between vectors vA and vB.    Vec _max(vMax, vA, vB)    Vec_min(vMin, vA, vB)    Vec_sub(vResult, vMax, vMin)
In the above instructions, Vec_max selects the larger ones from the elements of vector vA and the corresponding elements of vector vB to produce vector vMax; on the other hand, Vec_min selects the smaller ones from the elements of vA and the corresponding elements of vB to produce vector vMin; and Vec_sub subtracts vMin from vMax to produce vector vresult, which is the absolute difference of vectors vA and vB. Such a method takes two vector registers for the storage of intermediate results and three instructions to obtain the absolute difference of two vectors of numbers.
In another method according to the prior art, the following sequence of instructions is used to compute the absolute difference between vectors vA and vB.    Vec_sub(vTemp0, vA, vB)    Vec_sub(vTemp1, 0, vTemp0)    Vec_max(vResult, vTemp0, vTemp1)
In the above instructions, Vec_sub first produces vector vTemp0=vA−vB, then, vector vTemp1=vB−vA; and Vec_max selects the positive ones from the elements of vTemp0=vA−vB and the corresponding elements of vTemp1=vB−vA to produce vector vResult, which is the absolute difference of vectors vA and vB. Such a method also takes two vector registers for the storage of intermediate results and three instructions to obtain the absolute difference of two vectors of numbers.
Since many applications, such as application programs for performing motion estimation and motion compensation in decoding video images encoded using an MPEG standard, require the computation of the sum of absolute difference of two vectors, it is desirable to have an efficient method to compute the absolute difference of two vectors.
Vector processors allow simultaneous processing of a vector of data elements using a single instruction. Table look-up for a vector of data elements maps the data elements of the vector into another vector of data elements using one or an array of tables. In one scenario, each data elements of a vector is looked up from a look-up table, and looking up the data element from the look-up table is independent of looking up other elements from other look-up tables and thus multiple look-ups are preformed sequentially over time.
In one embodiment of the prior art, a vector permutation instruction in a vector processor is used to implement table look-up for a vector of data elements. The instruction for vector permutation generates a new vector of data, vD, selected from two vectors of elements, vA and vB, according to a vector of index data, vI. For example, AltiVec, a vector processor by Motorola, implements vector permutation instruction Vec perm. When executing    Vec_perm(vD, vA, vB, vI)the vector processing unit receives vectors vA, vB, and vI from a vector register file and produces vector vD. Vectors vA and vB are vectors of 16 data elements. Vectors vI is a vector of 16 integer numbers, containing control information to select 16 numbers from the 32 numbers in vectors vA and vB into vector vD. Each of the 16 integer numbers is encoded with i) information determining whether to select entries from either vA or vB, and ii) information determining the index for selecting a particular entry from a vector (vA or vB).
While this approach can be used to perform table look-up for a vector of data from a single small look-up table, there are severe limitations in its practical applications in processing large look-up tables. The indices for the look-up tables must be preprocessed to generate the index information in vector vI. The size of the look-up table that can be used in a table look-up in a single instruction is restricted by the number of bits allocated to represent the index information in vector vI, and by the total number of data elements that can be held by vector registers vA and vB. In a typical vector processor, two vector registers (vA and vB) can hold only 32 8-bit data elements. In general, it is necessary to use a program of multiple sequential instructions to implement vector look-up using one or an array of look-up tables. Further, due to the limited size of a vector register file, only a part of look-up table entries may be loaded into the vector register file when large look-up tables are used. Thus, when a set of large look-up tables are used, table look-up for a vector of data elements requires repeatedly loading table entries into the vector register file. Thus, it can be a very inefficient operation.
There are hardware implementations for table look-up. For example, most display hardware incorporates table look-up functionalities for gamma correction of displayed images. However, such functionality is very limited; and such hardware cannot be used to perform general purpose table look-up for a vector of data elements from an array of look-up tables.
Since many applications, such as software programs for computing pixel values in image processing, require the mapping of a set of values to another set of values using a set of different tables, it is desirable to have an efficient method to perform table look-up for a vector of data elements.
Variable length coding is a coding technique often used for lossless data compression. Codes of shorter lengths are assigned to frequently occurring fixed-length data to achieve data compression. Variable length encoding is widely used in compression of video data. For example, video images in accordance with JPEG, MPEG or DV standards are compressed using variable length encoding.
Variable length code words used in JPEG, MPEG, or DV compression schemes are typically from 2 to 16 bits in length. Thus, a single look-up table with 16-bit indices has potentially 64K entries. However, the majority of the 64K entries are redundant entries.
In one prior art embodiment, small look-up tables are arranged in a branched tree data structure with pointer logic to track the decoded value during decoding. A series of look-up operations using a number of small tables, typically, as many as four separate tables, are necessary in order to decode a code word.
To reduce the number of look-up operations and associated overhead, U.S. Pat. No. 6,219,457, incorporated by reference herein, describes a method for variable length decoding using only two look-up tables. A code word is first preprocessed to generate an index for a first look-up table to look up an entry for the generation of a pointer for a variable length code table. The entry looked up from the variable length table, using the pointer obtained from the first look-up table, provides information necessary to decode the code word. However, two sequential look-up operations, as well as associated overhead for preprocessing, are necessary to decode a code word.
Matrix transposition is a linear algebra operation commonly used in many fields of applications, such as in signal and image processing. The software implementations of matrix transposition are computationally expensive. When implemented on a scalar CPU, matrix transposition is performed by reading the elements of a matrix one element at a time and storing them in a transposed order.
The amount of computation can be greatly reduced by utilizing vector processing units. The efficiency of vector processing depends on the vector width and the flexibility of the instruction set supported by the execution units. One efficient method for matrix transposition on a vector processor (e.g., AltiVec by Motorola with vectors of 128-bit width) uses a series of vector merge instructions. An vector merge instruction interleaves halves of the elements from two vector registers to generate a new vector. Similarly, U.S. Pat. No. 5,875,355 describes methods to transpose a matrix using various data restructuring instructions.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,420 describes a matrix transposition device using a plurality of storage devices which is arranged so as to be able to input and output column vectors in parallel. However, the device described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,021,420 is specialized for matrix transposition and is difficult to be adapted for other applications.
An image can be represented by a matrix of points referred to as pixels. Each pixel has an associated color. Typically, a color may be represented by three components. The three different components used to represent the color define a color space. Many color spaces are presently used in various applications. For example, in computer graphics colors are represented in a RGB color space, where a color is represented by the levels of Red (R), Green (G), and Blue (B). In television equipment, colors are presented in a YUV space, where a color is represented by the levels of intensity (Y) and color differences (U and V). A YCrCb color space is a scaled and offset version of the YUV color space color, where the Y component represents luminance (intensity or picture brightness), the Cb component represents the scaled difference between the blue value and the luminance (Y), and the Cr component represents the scaled difference between the red value and the luminance (Y). Since digitized YCrCb components occupy less bandwidth when compared to digitized RGB (Red-Green-Blue) components, compressed video signals (e.g., DV signals) represent colors in a YCrCb space. The YCrCb color space was developed as part of a world-wide digital component video standard. However, many imaging and displaying devices generally use colors in a RGB space. Thus, a multimedia system must convert a video image from a YCrCb color space to a computer image in a RGB color space. Other commonly used color spaces include HLS, HSI, and HSV. Therefore, it is necessary to convert colors represented in one color space into colors represented in another color space for a set of pixels in an image. For a video stream, it is necessary to convert the color components for each frame of images in the video stream.
There are many techniques for color space conversion. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,510,852 describes a method and apparatus for performing color space conversion between digitized YCrCb components and digitized RGB components using a color look up table unit which is provided with transformation component values based on a selected one of two sets of conversions. A plurality of adders are coupled to the lookup table unit so as to receive the outputs thereof and generate individual color components of converted space by adding the transformation component values corresponding to each of the individual color components of converted space relative to the color components of original space. However, since dedicated hardware is required to perform color space conversion according to U.S. Pat. No. 5,510,852, such an approach is generally costly and is difficult to adapt to different configurations.
Blending two images into a new image is a common operation in many applications. For example, a video editing application may blend the images from two different video streams to create a new video stream with special effects. The general blending equation for computing an attribute of a pixel in a new image using those in two source images can be written as:D=K1*S1+K2*S2 
where D is the resulting attribute of the pixel; S1 and S2 are the attributes of the pixel in the source images; and K1 and K2 are the blending factors for the corresponding source images.
The blending factors may be constants, but are more generally functions of alpha1 and/or alpha2. In the most common case, K1 equals alpha1 and K2 equals one minus alpha1. The alpha values, known as “alpha” in the graphics world and “key” in the video world, generally represent the desired opacity of the associated image pixel. Generally, the alpha value is not constant over an entire image.
Blending is generally implemented using 32 bit, IEEE 754 compliant floating point arithmetic to avoid visually distracting artifacts. However, video source data, including “key”, is usually supplied in 8 or 10 bit integer format for each attribute; hence it is normally required to convert the integer source data to floating point data before applying the general blend equation and then convert the result back to integer data post blending.
To edit video streams, a video editing software application may be required to decode in real time several video streams in order to create video effects, such as blending of video sequences, picture in picture, titling, etc. The resulting uncompressed video images obtained after editing need to be compressed for storage. Compression/decompression of video data is an expensive operation. Add-in-boards are frequently used to accelerate the process of compressing or decompressing video data. Since such add-in-boards are quite expensive, video editing so far has been in the domain for video professionals. Consumer video editing software applications implemented on general purpose processors are slow and suffer from poor quality due to massive computation requirements.
The DV format, such as DV25 or DV50, due to its linear nature (i.e., the consecutive frames of video data are encoded in their display order), relatively low information loss (by using high bit rate coding) and the constant bit rate (i.e., each compressed frame has a constant size) is a preferred format for video editing on the desktop computers. Most of the digital video cameras produce DV bit streams. The compression and decompression processes of DV video streams are briefly outlined below.
DV compression belongs to a family of constant bit rate block based transform coding techniques. The input to a DV encoder is a 29.97 frames per second digital video stream in YUV color space. DV standards support various sampling structures in YUV color space, such as 4:1:1, 4:2:0 and 4:2:2 image sampling structures. An input video stream is processed in the units of 8×8 two-dimensional blocks of pixels. Blocks are organized into macro blocks, each consisting of four or six 8×8 pixel blocks. Macro blocks are organized into segments. A segment comprises 5 macro blocks (e.g., 30 blocks) and is compressed into a constant 400-byte bit stream.
Following the traditional transform coding approach, each pixel block is transformed into frequency domain using Forward Discrete Cosine Transformation (FDCT). The transformed coefficients are further quantized and entropy coded with variable length code words. Each compressed macro block in a segment has a header and a number of fixed size blocks (e.g., 4 luminance blocks and 2 chrominance blocks). In a segment, the code words for each block are concatenated before being distributed into the corresponding compressed-data area for the block in pass 1. In pass 2, the remaining of the blocks after the pass 1 operation that cannot be fitted into the corresponding compressed-data area are distributed in to their corresponding compressed macro block. In pass 3, the remainder after the pass 2 operation are distributed into the video segment.
The decompression process creates pixel data from a DV bit stream by performing reverse operations, namely Variable Length Decoding (VLD), Inverse Scaling (IS) and Inverse Discrete Cosine Transform (IDCT). Since code words are distributed in a segment in 3 passes, three corresponding passes of VLD operations can be used to recover all the information encoded using variable length code words.
The documentation of standards IEC 61834 and SMPTE 314M contains detailed descriptions about DV standards. Other video standards and image formats, such as MPEG and JPEG, also involves discrete cosine transformation, quantization, and variable length decoding. The general procedure to compress and decompress such video streams or images are the same.
Various implementations of DV decoders currently exist in the industry. Some dedicated chipsets are used in hardware implementations; and there are software applications for general purpose processors. The drawbacks of the hardware implementations using dedicated chipsets are the high cost, lack of scalability, and lack of compatibility with other components in video systems. The drawback of the software decoders on the general purpose CPUs is that the performance of a decoder highly depends on the computing environment, such as the run time usages of the CPU, memory, cache, and I/O devices. The instruction sets of general purpose processors are not well suited for processing encoded bit streams.
Variable Length Decoding (VLD), when implemented on a general purpose processor, is limited in performance by the operations for table look-up and conditional branch. The Huffman code used in a DV video stream can be up to 16 bits in length. One of the most efficient methods to perform VLD on a general purpose processor is to use a single look-up table. However, the single look-up table contains 64K entries, each entry consisting of a triplet of {run, level, code length}. Since each entry stored in system memory may require 16 bits, the single look-up table may require 128 Kbytes of system memory. The look-up table may be resident in the system memory. A single look-up table approach is highly inefficient from caching point of view. The cache miss penalty can dramatically reduce the performance. Multi-table approaches reduce the amount of memory required by the look-up table by looking-up sequentially in a number of smaller look-up tables, and thus suffers from increased execution time due to multiple sequential look-up operations and associated overheads.
The video editing applications require decoding several video streams simultaneously. Further, with High Definition TV (HDTV), the amount of processing power required for decompression can be very high. Thus, it is desirable to have efficient methods and apparatuses for variable length decoding bit streams.